Friday, October 10, 2008

OpenOffice 3.0 - Where Did It Miss?

openoffice.org 3.0 finalOnly yesterday I tried OpenOffice 3.0 final. It is a mega release of OpenOffice in many ways. Even it was the much hyped release of OO.o. Overall it seems a complete overhaul of the venerable open source office suite. There are dozens of new features and improvements.

Of all the improvements and additions what I liked the most are:

1. Support for MS Office 2007 file format
2. Multiple page preview in oowriter
3. Notes in the margin in oowriter
4. and almost a dozen of other niceties.

The best thing of this release is it has been a complete personality development to use less memory and cpu. It's a milestone in OO.o's development history.

Lastly, where did it miss? Feature-wise I have nothing to complain about. But as before, the age-old problem of OpenOffice, slow-startup is still there. May be future updates will take care of this problem. But it should have been addressed in this release itself. May be to achieve this the dev people would have delayed the release for some more months.

However, I am hopeful when Tex and RG will incorporate it into PCLinuxOS repo, it would be further polished - bother feature and performance-wise. So, I am not going to use it now. Waiting for PCLinuxOS 2009 and the OpenOffice that will come with it.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Slows start ups, not in Arch Linux. I was surprised at how fast it started up. So far I like it :-)

SaigonNezumi(Kevin)

manmath sahu said...

Oh that good old Arch! Even now after 5+ years of tinkering in the linux world I can't dare to play with Arch. However, I liked other source based distros like zenwalk and slackware, but while configuration it turned me off.

Good to know that you achieved it on Arch.

Anonymous said...

Just loaded it on Ubuntu Hardy.

Any module loads in under five seconds from the Applications Menu. Once a module is loaded, opening a new module with "File > New" occurs instantly.

It does not feel slow loading to me at all to me.

When working in the various modules everything seems snappier than previous releases. Everything seems more polished.

The Help system seems improved also.

I think this is a great release. Feels like a winner.

manmath sahu said...

ubuntu is a great distro, no doubt. it has great fan-following also. but i don't like it for three basic reasons:

1. It doesn't have an easy control center like that of mandriva, suse or pclos.
2. It gives root access with just sudo to the default users.
3. Lack of some non-free/proprietary stuff. Sure, one can pull them with little effort. But I wish them to be present at the first place.

Of course, Mint has made Ubuntu easy and usable.

How about this